Dispelling the fog of conspiracy: experimental manipulations, individual difference factors and the tendency to endorse conspiracy explanations

In our study, participants (N = 672) were exposed to neutral, conspiracy or anti-conspiracy information about the purported link between COVID-19 vaccination among the Alaskan Natives and their opposition towards the US government’s oil drilling projects. Afterward, they rated their agreement with conspiracy explanations of the presented information and filled in measures of sociopolitical behavioural intentions, institutional trust and powerlessness. We also controlled for differences in Dark Tetrad, paranoia, conspiracy mentality and distress. We found no difference in conspiracy explanations between neutral and conspiracy conditions, suggesting that the topic of COVID-19 vaccines was highly saturated with conspiracy theories. Importantly, the anti-conspiracy intervention led to decreased conspiracy explanations irrespective of an individual’s conspiracy mentality. Although conspiracy explanations were correlated with reported sociopolitical behaviour and institutional distrust, we found no differences between the groups in these variables, highlighting the importance of further research on the effectiveness of interventions in this regard.